The five restaurants that made headlines last month — Comal in Berkeley, Camino and Duende in Oakland, and Bar Agricole and Trou Normand in San Francisco — are eliminating tipping but implementing a 20 percent service charge. Patterson says he won’t have either, and will instead just raise prices by 15 percent. There won’t be any Healthy SF-related surcharges either: Just one price to pay.

“It’s really simple. I saw this coming a while ago,” he says. “People hate service charges. They hate service charges with a vengeance you think would be reserved for mass murderers and people who steal babies or something.”

Patterson actually tried service charges on an a la carte menu several years ago when Plum — his now-closed Oakland restaurant — first opened. The surcharge didn’t last long, and Plum is now an extension of the adjacent Plum Bar. For Aster, he’s taking a different approach.

“I said let’s do this: let’s just raise our prices 15 percent and have no tipping. Everyone gets paid hourly,” he says, noting that front-of-house hiring hasn’t started yet at Aster, which is slated to open in the coming months. When it opens there won’t be a receipt line to add a tip. “Within the group, everyone’s pretty nervous about it, but I really think in five years, that’s what everyone will be doing.”

“This is the beginning of the professionalization of the industry.”

Patterson has long had a 18 percent service charge at Coi, his four-star tasting menu restaurant in San Francisco, and still does. He says servers know they might make a little less money than they would be if they were at the best tipping house on busy nights, but they walk in the door knowing what they will make, even on slow nights. As a boss, he says the tipless system allows him to better reward individuals with raises.

At Coi, he’d says that he would love to raise prices and eliminate the service charge to make the menu one lump price. But he believes diners would start comparing pricetags with other similarly priced tasting menu restaurants that don’t include the service charge. Says Patterson: “They would be looking at our apples and others’ oranges.” (The French Laundry has an all-inclusive menu, but you know, they’re the French Laundry.)

So, Aster will be the trial.

“There’s always a shock with the new, no matter what you do,” he says. “I think this is something that, as people get used to it, it’s positive for everyone in its idea.”

“There’s a cultural shift that will require adjustments, but at the end of the day, it will create a very clean, respectful and transparent relationship,” he continues. “That thing on the menu costs $25. That’s all it costs. You don’t have four other costs on top of it. It’s either worth $25 or not worth $25.”